Lately, I've heard a lot about cloud computing. It starts with fast networks and technologies such as Mashups and REST interface. A mashup allows you to take information and processing coming from different sources and put them together to provide a new application and new insights based on the data manipulation.

REST (REpresentational State Transfer) is a way to access data, possibly through a web service, using the HTTP protocol (Web server protocol). This makes it simpler than using the SOA SOAP interface.

Now, providers like Google and Yahoo! provide email and storage services. I even hear that, with the help of virtualization, some companies are looking at providing a "web stack" that would provide the ability to run company businesses remotely. That sounds like a new twist to service-bureaux of olds.

There are several issues around this starting with response time and the complexity to provide what companies really want but it seems something that could take off. There are a lot of talks about web applications so why not a web IT infrastructure? That has a potential benefit of centralizing all the administrative needs.

I think this is something worth discussing. What do you think? Post comments to my blog to let me know.